I followed a link today off of esecurityintelligence.net and after reading the first graph of the piece I pretty much had a bad case of Tourrettes syndrome. This is some of the WORST reporting I have seen where it concerns the state of internet jihad. Now, I know why these places all do this, they just want a lead story and headline that will draw people in and make them click into the site. I get it… But.. It’s just wrong. The internet jihad is more a propaganda campaign than anything else and as you can see from the piece below from of all places, “The Sun” did a bit of a better job on the facts than dnaindia did!

So, as I was saying, a ‘bit’ of a better job.. Then they too go off the rails. Look, the cyber jihad or Internet jihad is comprised mostly of jihobbyists, guys who want to get in on the action but are too clueless to actually go to the battlefield in some cases. In others, they are deluded individuals with mental health issues that need to be medicated and taken care of. In either case, the needed skills to really cause greater issues other than setting up php bulletin boards to throw propaganda on are lacking on the part of the general jihobbyist populace. Just how many of the attacks by LulzSec were attributed to the likes of Al Qaeda?

hint: NONE

Yet the media persists in perpetuating this idea the there are some 31337 jihadi’s out there who are going to pwn the grid. Really guys, get your shit straight when reporting on things ok? I have seen some strives in the Jihadi hacking scene these last few years, but NOTHING like what you are talking about. Hell, their real hacker went to jail years ago (Irhabi007) What is worse it seems, is that likes of Home Secretary May, may in fact be spinning half truths about Internet jihad for whatever political expediency she needs. I have reported in the past about the Facebook Jihad (notice 2010) and pretty much sum it up to propaganda and thats it. Sure, there may be some illicit comms channels here, but, its Facebook for God’s sake! They are on top of this shit, TRUST ME! The jihadi’s have been complaining that as soon as they set up a Facebook page it gets taken down by Zucky and company! So really, there is no threat there.

So, lets take another look at it from the post LulzSec perspective.

Lulz have been wreaking digital havoc with some pretty low level hacks. They carried out DD0S, they hacked low hanging fruit and stole data which they then published. LULZ did it, NOT Al Qaeda. Now, don’t you think that if AQ was adroit at hacking and wanted to cause pandemonium they would have beaten LulzSec to it all? Don’t you further think that perhaps when and if they hacked the servers with the low hanging fruit hacks (SQLi) that instead of just publishing the data, they would have say RM’d the whole databases?

Think about it;

Economic targets like the stock market

Military targets like the recent Anon attacks on Booz Allen

Attacks on grid and other key infrastructure targets

ALL of these things likely already harbor vulnerabilities that the likes of Anonymous could already have access to! The difference? The LULZ don’t want to be thrown in a hole forever and know their limits I suspect. Now, if you were AQ though, what’s to lose?

NADA

AQ, if they had the capabilities would already have used it! They haven’t, which means to me they lack the critical skills in their jihobbyist base to be a threat in this arena. It is as simple as that. So please Media, fucking buy a clue and stop just trying to use the “If it bleeds it leads” mentality to get clicks. Do your JOB’s and get subject matter experts with credentials to talk about this stuff instead of just trying to scare the straights with false reports.

I have often written on this topic in the past and from what I have seen here is the overall picture of the state of Jihadi hacking tech.

They are using OLD malware packages to infect machines to steal data/money (mostly money)

They are using OLD hacking exploits for the most part just as they are with the malware packages

SOME jihadi hackers (TNT_ON) are clued in and know what they are doing technically, but yet are inept enough to leave their real IP addresses in their tutorial videos (I see you!)

They are learning.. Slowly.. but their sites still keep getting popped and their super sekret rooms online have been penetrated

Their crypto program (Mujahid Secrets) has been cracked/Reverse Engineered

Finally, let me leave you with this little bit of wisdom post the demise of OBL:

They got him because his lackeys were tracked by their electronic comms

Even though they were using sneakernet and email Dead Drops we managed to catch on (these techniques are not hacking)

Were OBL and his crew using high tech hacking techniques or crypto (aka steg) as their main means of communications, judiciously, it would have been even harder to get a line on what they were up to, where they were, and moving forward, determine future plans from OBL’s hard drives etc. Instead, they were using old spy tactics with minor digital twists to evade the US and other countries. This says a lot about their abilities and ours to detect them. They decided it was better to go old school because we cornered the digital market.

This follows today to the hacking scene, where we have some muslim hacker groups out there defacing pages, but not doing much else in the way of Islamic Electronic Jihad. So, media, let me put it plainly again;

They don’t have the skills to be super scary like you want them to be in your exaggerated reports!

2 Responses

Not disagreeing with you at ALL, but I did have an observation. You mentioned this “They don’t have the skills to be super scary like you want them to be in your exaggerated reports!”. A lot of people would have said something similar about AQ’s ability to pull off a 9-11 like attack on US soil. That is up until 9-11 when they did it. I think the issue is it is just not a priority to them. Loss of life and terror are their number one priority. So far it is very difficult to create a kinetic event by means of a cyber event. At least one that will generate the loss of life or terror in general. Mr. Clarke makes it sound easy, but at this point I think you are hard pressed to find a real world scenario that is realistic. Skill is an issue that is for sure, but it is also an issue of priority and focus. Let us hope that they continue to find other avenues that interest them more than a Network-centric approach. The same can NOT be said for a whole boat load of mad guys out there.